Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Purpose: Studies suggest that deficits in auditory processing predict cognitive decline and dementia, but those studies included limited measures of auditory processing. The purpose of this study was to compare older adults with and without probable mild cognitive impairment (MCI) across two domains of auditory processing (auditory performance in…

Training that uses exaggerated versions of a stimulus discrimination (fading) has sometimes been found to enhance category learning, mostly in studies involving animals and impaired populations. However, little is known about whether and when fading facilitates learning for typical individuals. This issue was explored in 7 experiments. In…

Purpose: In this study, the authors examined the ability of subjects with cochlear implants (CIs) to discriminate voice gender and how this ability evolved as a function of CI experience. Method: The authors presented a continuum of voice samples created by voice morphing, with 9 intermediate acoustic parameter steps between a typical male and a…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

The Woodcock-Johnson-Fourth edition (WJ IV; Schrank, McGrew, & Mather, 2014a) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014) are two of the major tests of cognitive abilities used in school psychology. The complete WJ IV battery includes the Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (Schrank,…

Psychoeducational assessment, and specifically cognitive testing, is important to the role of school psychologists; however, the utility of such testing has been called into question, and its future is unclear. Researchers are divided into two camps. One side grew disenchanted with cognitive testing after the failure of the discrepancy method to…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

It has been claimed that Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by a limited ability to process perceptual stimuli in reference to the contextual information of the percept. Such a connection between a nonholistic processing style and behavioral traits associated with ASD is thought to exist also within the neurotypical population albeit…

Motion information available to different sensory modalities can interact at both perceptual and post-perceptual (i.e., decisional) stages of processing. However, to date, researchers have only been able to demonstrate the influence of one of these components at any given time, hence the relationship between them remains uncertain. We addressed…

In 3 experiments, the authors tested performance in simple tone matching and classification tasks. Each tone was defined on location and frequency dimensions. In the first 2 experiments, participants completed a same-different matching task on the basis of one of these dimensions while attempting to ignore irrelevant variation in the other…

Development of the ability to classify auditory patterns was studied at grades 2, 6, 10, and 12 and at adult age levels. Both accuracy and feature use in classification were consistent across age; the age changes that did occur appeared to be due to differences in perception rather than process. (JMB)

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that the importance of linguistic labels for young children's conceptual organization stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input over visual input. Findings indicated that when auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4-year-olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli,…

Negative priming refers to slowed down reactions when the distractor on one trial becomes the target on the next. Following two popular accounts, the effect might be due either to inhibitory processes associated with the frontal cortex, or to an ambiguity in the retrieval of episodic information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to…

In training people to perform auditory identification tasks (e.g., training students to identify sound characteristics in a sonar classification task), it is important to know whether or not training procedures are merely sustaining performance during training or whether they enhance learning of the task. Often an incorrect assumption is made that…